Admit it: You always thought there wasn't any value to having a healthy vocabulary. "I needs me some threadz" and "Pardon me, good sir, prithy tell canst thou locate a haberdashery" pretty much mean the same thing. But now your vocabulary prowess has high stakes attached to it: The non-profit organization FreeRice has established an online word game where every word you guess correctly donates 20 grains of rice to a needy country.
When you get a vocabulary word correct, FreeRice uses advertising dollars on the site to buy 20 grains of rice; the hard-won rice is then distributed by the United Nations World Food Program to 75 countries. The site launched on Oct. 7 and has since donated 5,773,015,170 grains of rice. That may not seem like much, but that works out to about 199,069 1-lb. bags of super-tasty rice.
The vocabulary game gets harder as you progress, which seems to defeat the purpose, but I guess it makes the game more fun. The game can remember your IP address and save your score so you don't have to start with easy words each time you go back.
Just make sure you bone up on your vocabulary before you play the game -- call your middle-school English teacher or something. Remember: The future of the world's hungry depends on your knowledge of words like barcarole and greensward.
Add a comment